Mussorsky and the Russian charm

 

I listened to his music that came far through the ether to my cell below, among books, rosaries and prints, icons. The work of a loser becomes a song of resurrection. He touched the musical registers of the Russian soul, the Slavic dances, all that magnificence of Byzantium that the country of the tsars knew how to transfer to Christian validity. Russia is a vision of the world in the parameters of exaltation and hope and the orthodox melancholy that I have for me, which is a longing for heaven sheltered by the changes of earthly life that ends up in jail, hospital, asylum or Tomb.

 Mussorsky was a guard officer, a member of the famous Preobrayenski regiment, the Tsar's Alans, and ended up an alcoholic, deceased from a tavern. His great opera Boris Godunov failed. If music is the language of the spirit, in the language of this great composer the exact point or conjunction of latitude and longitude is reached, the perfect. He cannot give more of himself than is written on a pentagram. Because it interprets the harmony, that concento or mathematical disposition, which, according to the Greeks, allowed the passage of the spheres to be all of it a resonance of the divinity. His music is virile and upbeat. In it, power is transformed into act.

Unfortunate was his existence. He pilgrimage to failure but in his own sinking the greatness of art is perceived. In his music sounds the myth of the eternal return, the fighting forces of good and evil, of light and shadow. In the middle is the man doomed to mystery under the aegis of those powers. Let's call them passions, the imperative of inexorable destiny that the Russians designate as sudba. Shadows play Parcheesi. Death or luck. He shoots because he touches you. He moves the cup. The dice are in the air. From goose to goose Death always wins the game, but in the meantime...

Art must reflect that inexorable tension towards eternal beauty, the ideal world. And the artist feels doomed to utopia but very ruinous are the wickers in which our basket was forged.

All the Spanish mystics in their writings complain that the body is heavy. Instincts drag down. The Lord is above and requires the courage and willpower that Catholic and Protestant authors who pursue human divinization with acts emphasize so much, as an English author explains very well in his ascetic book the pilgrim progress… we are really very little thing, you do not get excited, you are nothing more than dust.

It is the law of gravity opposed to the lightness of the subtle soul that tries to fly. However, in orthodoxy God is manifested, not reached. The process marks a backwards trajectory. The god of the Russians is humanized and flutters in the magic of psalmody and church songs. You have to feel it, live it, not explain it, as Roman theology tries from the Angelico to Charles de Hardin and this contemplation of Christ the Redeemer is reflected in the great Russian composers, transfixed by deity

However, this divine union, this hypostasis, is achieved more than by holy men by brilliant artists like Mussorsky.

Beauty is amoral (there is no body, no parts or shares that end up decomposing at the expense of nutrition, generation, disease, Adam's sin), immortal and immaterial. God is a winged spirit, he has no body. He is there. He is who he is, according to the Jews, who are reluctant to call him by his first name, fearful of pronouncing his appellation and go around with synonyms... yahvé, jehova´, adonai. Incomprehensible, incomprehensible, eagle that he soars through the abyss, and flies over the top of overhangs and ravines.

It is a timeless flight. The deity does not know the hic et nunc. Nobody has seen him because if he showed up we would die. He has only manifested himself once behind a burning bush but where he best leaves his mark is in music. The great music of the Russian masters. O Christ of great power!